


Lost and Found

by dairesfanficrefuge_archivist



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: No Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-01-30
Updated: 2004-01-30
Packaged: 2018-12-18 05:28:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11867700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dairesfanficrefuge_archivist/pseuds/dairesfanficrefuge_archivist
Summary: What happens if a Watcher loses track of their Immortal? A day in the life of a special IT department of the Watchers...





	Lost and Found

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Daire, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Daire's Fanfic Refuge](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Daire%27s_Fanfic_Refuge). Deciding to give the stories a more long-term home, I began importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in August 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Daire's Fanfic Refuge's collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/dairesfanficrefuge/profile).

Lost and Found by Ammaletu

  
  


_Lost and Found_

By Ammaletu 

rating: harmless, no Slash :-)   
characters: original characters, Ceirdwyn   
summary: What happens if a Watcher loses track of their Immortal? A day in the life of a special IT department of the Watchers... 

* * *

_entry in the chronicle of Ceirdwyn:_   
01 April 2002, ca. 11:30 AM, Airport Madrid Barajas   
      - contact lost 

* * *

_Prologue:_

Numerous people rushed around her, but she stood firm as a rock among the masses. In her hand she held a plane ticket, but now she stared irresolutely upon it. Was he right with his advice? And how should she do that anyway? 

Suddenly someone bumped into her, apologized in broken Spanish and hastened on. Ceirdwyn gazed at the case that he swiftly pulled behind him and which was full of stickers of its owner's previous travel destinations. A name caught her eye that brought up a flood of memories. And suddenly she knew what she would do. With new verve she turned around and searched the nearest airport map... 

* * *

_Wednesday, 03 April 2002  
07:02 AM_

A rising and ebbing beeping sound slowly wakes me up. Elaine thumps me on the arm. "Can you eventually answer it?" Then she turns and buries her head under the pillow. 

I cautiously open my eyes and blink. Unintentionally I gaze at the radio clock. _Oh shit!_ What does that make? Four and a half hours? 

But ignoring the sound is futile; whoever is calling seems to be serious. I crawl out of the bed and search, irritated by the ringing, for my mobile phone. Trouser pocket - negative. In my coat, on the edge of the armchair, I finally find it. 

"Yes?" I answer drowsily and try to massage the sleep out of my eyes with my free hand. My gaze falls on the Watcher tattoo - sometimes I really regret that I joined them. 

"Martin? She is gone, they lost her." 

In my mind I slowly count to three and then pose the inevitable question: "Who is gone, Lucas?" My associate can really drive me mad with his habit of letting one ask for each and every bit of information. 

"Ceirdwyn! Her Watcher lost her at the airport. She doesn't have a clue where Ceirdwyn is now." 

I whistle, impressed. Ceirdwyn is not just any Immortal; she is one of the oldest of them. You don't want to lose someone like her even for only a week. 

"Ok," I sigh. "On my way." With a regretful look at the interesting curves under the blanket, I start to collect my scattered clothes. Before I sneak to the bathroom, I call Lucas back. 

"Lucas? You know that I'll kill you if this is kind of a late April Fool's joke, don't you?" 

* * *

_07:33 AM_

A fast shower is all I had time for. The coffee has to wait until I reach the Black Box. Slowly I walk across the campus. It's relatively quiet so early in the morning. Only a few unfortunates leave the student's quarters just like me, most of them heading for the main building. Behind the small wood I see the houses of Geneva; the Watcher Training Academy lies elevated on a hill at the edge of the city. I turn to my right and walk over to the rear of the main building. I would have never imagined this, but after several months I really like my life here in Geneva. And thinking of last night, I thank whoever decided to settle the Watcher IT department not at the headquarters but at the Academy... 

I fish the key card out of my pocket and open the door that leads to the cellar rooms of the annex. We call our domicile down here jokingly "Black Box", for as we moved in back in October the dark half of the year had just begun and there was hardly any light coming through the tiny windows. But we don't want to complain, the office is spacious, the computers have it nicely cool and the best is: nobody disturbs us. 

"Morning," I mumble in Lucas' direction while walking directly towards the electric kettle. Slowly my fingers start to defrost, it's damn cold out there so early in the morning. Water, cup, cappuccino - before this I'm not addressable anyway. 

Lucas doesn't care and immediately starts the briefing. He shouts across half the room: "Yesterday evening the Regional Coordinator of Western Europe got a call from Debra Adkins from Madrid. She reported that she lost contact with the Immortal Ceirdwyn." Lucas gets louder because the water starts to boil. "Adkins is the Area Supervisor in Madrid," he now almost yells at me. I'm so kind as to walk over to his desk. "If she reports something like that, it's serious. Anyway, Western Europe decided to forward this to us directly this time. Word of the Reagan Cole incident seems to have spread." 

Lucas grins at the memory of our first real success. In mid January Reagan Cole, also one of the more active Immortals, disappeared without a trace. Watchers all over the world looked for her, for weeks. When finally someone had the idea to forward the case to internal departments like us, we needed no more than two days to locate our bounty hunter - on a vacation on Martinique. Since this day there is a sign on the door of the Black Box, reading "Lost & Found". 

"So Ceirdwyn," I mumble thoughtfully. "Ok, start gathering her files." Time for the cappuccino. Lucas turns to his computer while I'm looking forward to the start of the day. 

* * *

_08:16 AM_

Lucas and I have looked through the files of Ceirdwyn, her official Watcher file as well as our own notes that we keep about every Immortal. 

"So," Lucas abstracts. "On March the 28th Ceirdwyn books, as expected, a flight to Paris. Since she moved to Madrid six years ago, she flies to Paris once a year, always at the beginning of April." 

"Her husband, Steven Jarmel," I'm reading in her file. He was shot in early April of 1995. In Paris. 

"Exactly. So Debra Adkins did expect nothing else and was at the airport together with the Immortal on Monday. And there she lost her in the crowds while they were waiting for the belated plane." 

"But we know which flight she did book. Why wasn't she picked up in Paris?" 

"They tried, but she was not in the plane." 

"And her luggage?" 

"Was not there either. Although it could just have gone the normal way to Murmansk." (1)

My god, Lucas can be really straining in the early morning. I'm grinning artificially, the cappuccino did not really wake me up. 

"Quickening?" This is the first question under normal circumstances. 

"No, no signs of one. Not anywhere near the airport. There was nothing in the local media that hinted towards a Quickening or the finding of a decapitated body. And no reports from the Watchers of that area." 

"Well..." That makes it a bit difficult, but that's why we work on the case now. "I don't assume that she turned up at her home?" 

Lucas looks at me as if he wants to say "Pleeease!" "Understood, she didn't open for any of the pizzas." That's a standard trick in those cases, to try to deliver a pizza that wasn't ordered. 

"It would be so much easier if she fell for mobile phones," Lucas sighs and is already grinning again. He can't stop grinning as soon as it comes to this topic. Admittedly, his idea was ingenious and could revolutionize the work of the Watchers somewhat. Lucas, convinced of his acting talent, had even insisted on personally flying over to the States and selling the poor Benny Carbassa a mobile phone. As long as he considered it hip enough, he would hardly look into the inner life of it or gage on which frequencies his phone transmits. His conversation recordings now fill some megabytes per day. Quite useless recordings, yes, for one can hardly imagine a more boring Immortal than Benny Carbassa, but it's a beginning. 

"Ok, was her workplace checked?" I scroll through her file to see what Ceirdwyn does at the moment for a living. Art Gallery, I see... 

"She has taken a leave for two weeks and hasn't been seen since," Lucas answers, who has been looking through information about Ceirdwyn since seven o'clock. 

I look at our notes about her. Mobile Phone - negative. E-Mail - negative. Internet Use - negative. Computer - negative. My goodness, the old Immortals really make it hard for us. It's a wonder that she got herself a telephone. 

"What about her credit card?" I propose. 

Lucas shakes his head. "She got her current card some weeks ago. We don't even know yet which bank issued it." 

Shit! Now it gets difficult. 

"You know what?" I say to my colleague. "Call Jenny! She's on leave this week, but she always is creative with problems like this." 

* * *

_10:38 AM_

Meanwhile, we have checked the passenger lists of the last two days for all her aliases we know of and found nothing. But if she flew last-minute, she would not show up on the passenger lists that are accessible in the Internet (well, at least accessible for us). Her car is standing untouched on the parking lot and still nothing moves in her apartment. 

The door opens and Jenny enters the room. Lucas looks at his watch and jokingly asks: "You had headwind?" Jenny actually lives just ten minutes away. 

"It's my holidays, Lucas," she replies and moves over to her computer. "Regardless of which Immortal terrorizes the world right now, this week is my holidays." That's what I like about Jenny, there are things in her private life that she places above her work for the Watchers. An expanded breakfast with her family seems to be one of these. 

"Ok, so let me in on this!" she requests. "Who is it this time?" 

* * *

_11:31 AM_

"Boys, boys, boys!" Jenny has to become louder in order to drown us out because Lucas and I just exchange wild speculations about the case. Sometimes this kind of chaotic brainstorming does indeed lead to a result. 

"How about a more logical approach for a change?" 

We look at each other and nod. "Go on!" 

"So, she did not fly to Paris, not with the booked flight. She also is not at home or away with her car. For now we assume that she has left Madrid. Right?" 

"Yep!" 

"Ok, what does this leave us with? Does she walk through central Spain by foot? Is she traveling by train, car or bus? Or has she picked another flight?" Jenny writes the five possibilities on a big flipchart standing at one wall of the Black Box. 

We look at each other. "She was at the airport," I reply. "So it seems logical that she took another flight." 

Jenny nods and underlines this hypothesis. 

"But Western Europe has already checked all flights to be considered and their destinations, everything that left Madrid on this day," Lucas throws in. 

"Now lets approach from a different direction," Jenny proceeds. "Why didn't she fly to Paris? She has done so for five years, as regular as a clockwork." 

"Must have changed her mind," Lucas says. 

"Right," Jenny agrees. "And the key question is: Why? Any proposals?" 

I jokingly lift my hand and say: "I'm for Chinese." 

Two irritated looks hit me and I point to my watch. It has really become time for lunch, or in my case for breakfast first. 

* * *

_12:17 AM_

I follow the meandering path to the main building, cautiously carrying two plastic bags that were filled at a nearby Chinese restaurant. This took an eternity again, after the Easter holidays the city is really buzzing with life. 

_Holidays,_ I'm thinking. Could this be? An old Celtic holiday as a result of which Ceirdwyn now sits in Stonehenge around a mythical fire? Lucas will have to check this, it's not quite my domain. 

Finally I enter the Black Box and find Jenny and Lucas engrossed in a conversation. Can't understand a word, the two of them are talking in Jenny's mother tongue again. I have to admit I hate it when they do this. Despite learning it in school for some years, my French is more than miserable. 

I hand out the food, and Lucas asks me: "Can we delay the billing? My account is quite blank right now." 

"Of course, no..." I reply as something occurs to me, "...problem." 

"What? Some ingenious idea?" 

"Yes." This could be promising. "We know nothing about her new credit card, but: If she has paid anything with it yet, she should have gotten a bill at the end of the month." 

"So we just have to take a look on her bank account," Jenny adds and smiles. 

* * *

_02:41 PM_

We have divided the work. Lucas and Jenny are checking all friends and acquaintances of Ceirdwyn. In an attack of brilliancy Lucas also reviews Immortals whom Ceirdwyn has unfinished business with. I on the other side have paid the server of Ceirdwyn's bank a little visit and now know that she owns a MasterCard. This is a good beginning, and as she surely has the credit card running under her current alias... 

In this moment a scream sounds through the room. "Martin!" Lucas, who is noting down something, winces and makes a scrawl over half the sheet. 

"Martin, Lucas, come over! That's it," Jenny exclaims, in an entire atypical excitement. 

I grab a free chair and drag it over to Jenny's desk. "What's up?" 

"Matthew McCormick," she tells us and points to his file on her monitor. I need a few seconds to remember the name. "Ceirdwyn was his mentor, wasn't she? Are they still friends?" 

"They are," Jenny affirms. "And they have met on this particular day." 

"But this surely was checked by our field colleagues?" does Lucas, who has likewise moved over, doubtfully throws in. 

"Would be desirable, but look at this." She opens another file, a daily status report of Field Watcher Timothy Hersey. "McCormick and his partner Hersey were in South Africa on a case of legal assistance. They flew back on Monday." 

"Actually, South Africa is not right around the corner from Spain," Lucas comments, but I begin to suspect what Jenny means. 

"Return flight over Europe?" I ask her and she nods. 

"Agent Hersey doesn't go into any details in his report, he only says that he took a flight earlier because of FBI-internal reasons. But he picked up McCormick in DC on the evening of April the first as expected. His flight went over London." 

Jenny opens a website, a weather map of Europe. "Now look at this. Noon of April the first. You remember the thunderstorm?" 

She is right, the weather was quite uncomfortable on Easter Monday. And according to the map there was an even worse storm over the British Channel. 

Jenny tips on it and continues: "His flight should have gone over London, but because of the storm it was redirected to Madrid." 

"And his Watcher didn't bother to note this little detail in his report," I realize. 

"Exactly! I have calculated the times, and the chances are excellent that he waited there for the continuation of his flight at exact the same time as Ceirdwyn." 

* * *

_02:54 PM_

As I wait for Agent Hersey's return call, my telephone rings. But it's not a call from the USA but rather a campus-internal number. 

"Hello, this is Professor Chenard. I have a little problem." 

_Oh no!_ is my first thought. Not her again. 

"And this would be?" I could sound friendlier, presumably, but I really don't bother to feign sympathy today. 

"My e-mail is not working anymore, I can't fetch my mails." 

I bet my computer that I know the reason. 

"Did you change the security settings of your mail program in the way I described it in my newsletter mail last week?" 

The Watcher mail server, for whose maintenance our little team is responsible besides chasing Immortals, now supports a higher level of encryption in the communication. 

"Newsletter? I didn't receive a newsletter mail. What shall I do about this now?" 

_Of course you did!_ And loud: "No problem, I'll just send you the mail again." This joke is as old as Methos, but I had waited to use it since I began to work here. "It's just some simple modifications on the settings of your mail client. Have a nice day." 

Then I hang up and start counting silently. By seven it rings again, but I put the call over to Lucas. Shall he bother with her. 

Meanwhile, I remembered something that totally escaped me when I left Agent Hersey a message some minutes ago: It's a great deal earlier in Washington... about 9 o'clock?! I hope Hersey soon starts his working day. In the meantime I turn to some bank servers. There surely must be a way to find out what Ceirdwyn paid with her credit card in the last few days. 

* * *

_03:30 PM_

So McCormick gave no hint of a meeting with Ceirdwyn. There was nothing unusual to report, Hersey just told me. Could have thought so, but asking doesn't do any harm. I continue working on the MasterCard-Server while Jenny is talking with her little daughter on the phone. 

* * *

_05:54 PM_

Slowly, tiredness creeps into our holy halls. Lucas yawns hearty, Jenny looks more often at the clock than at her monitor, and I'm not brimming over with enthusiasm, either. The security precautions of this particular server turn out to be frighteningly good; I've been searching for a weak point for over two hours now, without avail. Jenny strolls over to me and asks: "How are things with you?" 

"Not that good," I answer and take a sip of my tea. In this moment Lucas calls us: "Got her!" 

That gets our attention, and we move together at his computer. On the monitor we can see a blurry freeze image and... yes, the woman in the center of it could very well be Ceirdwyn. 

"Where did you get this from?" Jenny asks and is no less astonished than I am. In the last few hours we both did not pay much attention to what Lucas was doing. 

"Oh, simple," he proudly explains. "You surely remember how Martin wrote that human person classificator lately." What an understatement, I worked some months on it! 

"Well, I took a look at the server of the airport police. Official institutions are so easy to hack," he rejoices. "Had a little program do random screenshots of the security camera recordings of the point of time in question and chased the classificator with Ceirdwyn's pattern over it. _Et voilá,_ here she enters a store." 

"...aria Re..." I decipher the blurry writing above the glass door, only half of which can be seen. It takes Jenny just a few seconds to find the company on the airport map. "Avaria Rental, lowest level. No wonder Debra Adkins did not find Ceirdwyn down there." 

"Why does she rent a car when her own car stands right outside on the parking lot? Do I have to understand this?" Lucas asks. 

"The logical conclusion is that she needs a certain kind of car," I state, and Jenny adds: "Or not a car but a motorcycle." She has opened the website of the company. "Rent cars and motorcycles" it says right on the front page. She searches a while and then comes to the conclusion: "Avaria are the only ones at the airport Madrid who rent out motorcycles." 

For some seconds we all are lost in our thoughts before an inspiration strikes me. "Motorcycle? Spain? There was something." Back at my computer I again scroll through Ceirdwyn's file. Jenny steps behind me and calls with Ctrl+F the search mask. I have to grin, why don't the simple ideas occur to me? 

"Motorcycle"... there it is! 

"Her honeymoon with Steven Jarmel - they toured with two heavy motorcycles through Southern Spain," Jenny mumbles impressed, while she scans the corresponding entry in the chronicle. 

* * *

_07:12 PM_

"Maybe we should just report this to Western Europe and be done with it," Jenny proposes. "I mean, if they stick to the route of the honeymoon trip, they will surely pick her up somewhere." 

Somehow this seems inappropriate to me. "I don't know, we have a reputation to lose. I would rather give the coordinator a more exact location." 

"Ok, you know what? I'm outta here for today. You guys can surely handle the rest of this without me, can you?" And with this she stands up, shuts down her computer and rushes, waving goodbye, out of the room. I'm stunned for a moment, but then Lucas finally returns. "Who's haunting her?" he asks. 

"You got the book?" I only want to know. He nods and waves with a book with an unimpressive blue binder. The Ceirdwyn Chronicles, 20th century, Book Two. The chronicle that is accessible to us online soon starts to get a little bit vague when it comes to details of former decades. But luckily, the library of the WTA has copies of the complete chronicles of some of the more important Immortals. 

"I really had to plead with them to let me take the book with me. Normally, they don't lend out anything," Lucas says while I'm browsing through the book. _August 1983, there we have it._ I scribble down the stations of the honeymoon trip and evaluate the distances. 

"Sevilla! If not something is really amiss, she now should be in Sevilla. They started their honeymoon there back then." I grin at Lucas and he grins back. "Do you want to or shall I?" I ask him and point at the telephone. 

"It would have been Jenny's turn but go ahead. I have to defrost first." 

"Ok." I grab the telephone. They have meanwhile formed a task force in the Regional HQ Western Europe that leads the search for Ceirdwyn. We got informed about it per e-mail at noon. Despite the late hour someone immediately answers my call. 

"Jean Deslauriers. Yes?" 

"Martin Malvin here, IT department Geneva. Concerning the search for Ceirdwyn..." 

"Oh, that is as good as settled," he cuts me off. "A female Immortal has been sighted in London, the identification is nearly..." 

"She's in Sevilla." Now I cut him off. For a moment there is only silence on the other end. 

"Sevilla? What makes you think so?" 

"She went to a car rental service at the airport. We think that she leased a motorcycle and now follows the stations of her honeymoon trip of 1983. If this is correct, she now should be in Sevilla." 

"Sevilla, well..." After our success with Reagan Cole the gentlemen got cautious with comments like "That's absurd!", but I can sense that that's exactly on the tip of his tongue now. 

"Good luck with searching her," I say and hang up. 

* * *

_07:31 PM_

We shut down the workstations, only the servers are still cheerfully humming. I swiftly check Ammaletu, the first server we purchased back then and which we subsequently named after the mythical first Watcher. A new audio file is just arriving from Chicago; an automatic process will later compile a text version of Benny's telephone call. I switch off the monitor and then walk over to Lucas who's ready to leave. 

"Like a cocktail?" he asks me. 

"I don't know, it's been a long day." 

"Oh come on, it's still Happy Hour at the >Marais<," he tries to enthuse me. "And maybe you can invite the girls from last week? I really got along perfectly with the small blonde, but she forgot to give me her telephone number." 

While we close the door of the Black Box and take the three steps up into the cold evening air, I look at Lucas for a moment, trying to figure out if he means this serious or not. But then I convince him not to clink glasses until tomorrow when we're not the only ones to know about our success. And of course when it will have turned out whether we are right with out little theory. 

* * *

_08:12 PM_

Finally at home! My stomach growls, and it strikes me that I haven't checked my e-mails since early afternoon. But first I drop relaxed on the couch. My last thought for this day is whether we will make it for the "Watcher of the Year" with activities like today. Then I'm gone... 

* * *

_Epilogue:_

She sat on a bank and listened to the cathedral bells strike ten o'clock. She felt cold, but she couldn't avert her gaze. The place in front of the cathedral was lit by countless candles and torches, and despite the cold people were standing around in groups, listening to the music of the band. Some of them danced, and Ceirdwyn constantly heard happy laughter. 

On this evening she was not taking part in the turbulence, she was only watching. But her thoughts took her to a time twenty years ago when Steven and she themselves danced the whole night through the streets of Sevilla. 

_Matthew was right,_ she thought. _He knows me better than I would have thought._

Celebrate Steven's life and not his death - that was what he had told her at their brief meeting at the airport. And now Ceirdwyn knew that it had been the right decision for she felt more close to Steven now than all the years before at his grave. 

Slowly she stood up and walked over to the large fountain in the middle of the place. From her pocket she took the candle that she had bought this afternoon, lit it on a flame, and put it on the edge of the fountain where some dozen other candles were already burning. She looked at the glow of the flame that was reflected by the water, and in her mind she said goodbye to Steven, like she did every year. But this year it didn't hurt half as much. 

_Would the tree in Cartagena still be standing?_ she wondered, while she listened to the music. _And the little restaurant in Málaga..._

Yes, there was so much to discover, to rediscover. Quietly humming, she turned around and walked through the narrow alleys of Sevilla back to her hotel. 

* * *

_entry in the chronicle of Ceirdwyn:_   
04 April 2002, ca. 04.45 PM, center of Sevilla   
      - contact reestablished 

  
_\- THE END -_

* * *

Notes:   
This story pretty much developed itself while I was writing it. I just started with the thought of a special watcher department that keeps track of Immortals with all high tech means. Matthew McCormicks involvement or the thought that Ceirdwyn might have moved to Madrid (you remember, ten minutes before his death Steven tried to convince Ceirdwyn to move to Madrid, but she liked Paris better) - all the rest of the story came more or less spontaneously. 

(1) Concerning the remark about Murmansk... it seems that I just can't refrain from quoting Douglas Adams in my stories. This is a little hint at his second Dirk Gently novel "The long dark teatime of the soul," which begins like this: 

_"It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression 'as pretty as an airport'. Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), [...]"_

With thanks to...  
...the proof reader of the translation: Veita  
...the beta readers of the original story: Aisling and Enni 

_written: 30/31 Jan 2004_

* * *

© 05/31/2004 \+ emailE + '">'   
Please send comments to the author! 

* * *  
  
---  
  
  
  



End file.
